Tag Archives: self-publishing blogs

Well, it is tempting to feel that this whole series was a massive waste of time. It certainly didn’t generate the kind of conversations I had hoped it would. For better or for worse, I still accomplished my own goal of thinking through the last three years of our journey here at Serenity Mountain Publishing and setting our sites on the next few years.

Looking at the Week 1 post, there are a few areas I have not touched on yet that can be easily and quickly covered.

Bookstores/Consignments: Most huge chain stores (Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million) will not touch self-published books. Unless you are really far down the road and seeing huge success, don’t waste your time. There is an application process, and you may wait a year for an answer. Make sure you are offering them a product they are confident they can sell. Sadly, the same lack of interest is pretty true of independent bookstores. They will probably only take your book on consignment, and the few that we tried ended up costing us money, even though some books did sell. There are usually set-up fees. You’ll be lucky to break even. The big exception to this is if you have a personal connection to a bookstore in your town or general area. Then you may find great support and can have a book event and may get your book featured face out (as opposed to spine out among the hordes on the shelves) as a featured local author. If you can pull that off, absolutely go for it. Otherwise, don’t spend lots of time courting bookstores.

Contests/Awards: This can be a very long conversation, but the main thought is that you want to be sure the contest is of some value and will look impressive on the cover of your book. I try to limit my attention to contests with entry fees under $100. There are lots of them. The Writer’s Digest annual contest for self-published and indie-published books offers feedback, and that’s great to have (even though I thought they nick-picked on odd things). Do awards on the cover matter? Would it matter to you if you were going to buy a book by an author you had never heard of? Keep that in mind when you decide to enter a contest. Do you stand a chance of winning? Don’t throw away entry fees. I KNOW that the awards on my book covers have helps make sales, especially the Mom’s Choice Award. That one is nice because it’s not really a contest where you are up against other books. You simply have to meet their standards to earn the honor of putting the award on your book. But I tell you, those entry fees and licensing fees cost a pretty penny, so don’t enter if you don’t think you can earn it. Research the contest. Does it look impressive? Is the cost fair? Make your calls from there.

Write a series for the biggest bang: It is a mantra you will see in every book about self-publishing out there (and hear from traditional publishers as well) – writing a series is the best way to earn a loyal fan base and make money. Even if you don’t write a series, you are going to have to write more than one book. I don’t even care about the genre thing. Just write and publish, and then do it again. By the end of 2016, I will have 6 children’s middle grade science fiction/fantasy books self-published and one adult paranormal/spiritual book plus a non-fiction children’s biography of Betty White published by an indie publisher. I have some picture books I need to send out too. I think being all over the place is fine, just write! Worry about the story and what you have to say, then get it on paper.

And that’s all I have to say about self-publishing. I’m sure there will be more here and there along the way, but that wraps up this series.

Now I’m on to more writing on “Slinky Steps Out” and editing for Pen-L and paperback and ebook proofs for “Max’s Wild Night” and spring break (well, at least the alarm clock won’t go off) in the week ahead.

Well, I’ve gotten a bit off my schedule over the last couple of weeks, but my blog pretty much always takes a back seat to other work. It certainly has recently. I did make my word count goal for February, and Pen-L Publishing has two more books done with my proofreading skills. Sadly, however, I wasn’t able to attend the February meeting of the Ozark Writers League (OWL) due to a nasty ice storm that hit the night before. Travel on my mountain roads was out of the question, but in Branson they were able to pull together some workshops in the hotel and then pick up around noon when things started thawing out. Tomorrow I will be attending the Northwest Arkansas Writer’s Workshop meeting in Fayetteville and will hopefully get to see the friends I missed at OWL.

There’s not much left to wrap up on my self-publishing journey evaluation, but one area is really important so I don’t want to let it slide: freebies and sale promotions. Any self-publishing author has got to evaluate the benefits of giving away her work or offering discounted prices. It’s just part of the game. Readers of indie books expect it, but you don’t have to let yourself or your work be taken advantage of. You worked hard to write and publish that book. Freebies have their time when they can get your book into potential readers’ hands.

If you have a series, doing a freebie on Book 1 can result in sales on the other books in the series. That’s the biggest motivation out there, and I have personally found this to be true. Around here, we call “Why Kimba Saved The World” our sacrificial lamb. Doing free promotions on that book have led to increased sales for the other two. Not everyone who downloads your freebie will ever even read your book, but some of them will. Some of them will even like it. Some will purchase other books in the series. Can you hear the field narrowing down as it goes along? So make sure you get enough downloads to have those numbers at the end of the stream be high enough to make a difference.

If you are exclusive with Kindle Direct Publishing in their Select program, you can run 5 free promo days every 90 days. I use those free days pretty consistently for Book 1 in my series. Two or three days at a time is the most productive. The times I do it without much advertising it still gets hits, but when you can loop a free promo with a significant (but not super expensive) advertisement you will do even better.

Example: I was able to get a BookBub ad for a free promo on “Why Kimba Saved The World.” If you don’t know about BookBub, click on the link to find out more right now. This site is key for indie ads. I tried several times before I was accepted, so be persistent. When that ad ran, 14,000 copies of “Why Kimba Saved The World” were downloaded for free. Did you catch that number?? That gave me a big wide field, and yes, the numbers on Book 2 and Book 3 sales rose afterward and there are still months where those two are higher than Book 1.

BookBub is the only ad site I can speak to with the authority of my own experience at this point. Tweeting about a freebie offer has had limited results. @KimbaBaby often tweets about sales because the vast majority of her followers are cats or cat people. This number has doubled since our last promotion, so I will find out soon if I have any takers among her new friends. There are many sites that will ask you to pay for an ad for your freebie. Unless you expect huge results, I wouldn’t try those. Losing money is never the goal.

On March 20-22, “Why Kimba Saved The World” will be on free promo again. I will also offer Book 2 and Book 3 for 99 cents each as incentive to pick them up right then and there when making the free download. This promo will be advertised through The Fussy Librarian. The cost of advertising with this site is inexpensive, but it remains to be seen if the ad will make a difference. I’ll do a specific blog after this sale to let you know where I ran ads and if any of them worked.

Another kind of free promotion I have coming up involves the release of a new book: “Max’s Wild Night.” Through my newsletter, I will be offering a free ebook of “Max” to anyone who has published amazon.com reviews of all three of my Cats in the Mirror books. This is a new strategy for me, but I have heard it suggested by more than one indie-pub helper book. I will lose some guaranteed sales to my fans who follow my newsletter, but I also stand an even better chance of gaining good reviews on amazon.com. That is totally worth it. Maybe they will still want a paperback copy of “Max” as well. I’ll let you know how it goes. Does it sound like an offer you’d like to take me up on? Sign up for my newsletter in the right hand column next to this article (right at the top of the web page) and you can!

Are there downsides to freebies? Of course. The biggest one I have found is that people will download your book who would never buy it and, frankly, it is not anything they should have ever read. Their reviews will be bad and odd and ones you could have done without. As long as this stays within reason, and your other reviews are good, you can weather the storm. It will help get your final amazon review numbers up, and this is good thing. Discerning readers can take the reviews/comments for what they are worth and compare them to the dozens of good reviews you have.

There is also the very real chance that these freebie takers never pay for books. I mean never. They just troll freebie sites. No matter how much they enjoy Book 1, they are never going to pay even 99 cents for your other books. Those are the middle of the field. You don’t really lose anything by them getting your book, you just don’t gain anything either.

Goodreads giveaways must be paperbacks, so you are already losing money. I have done several of these. It gets you on people’s “to be read” list, but I don’t know that it has led to any sales. Tread lightly there.

I have also found that offering a book for free during a blog tour to promote it just means that no one will buy a copy then and there. If they can enter to win a free copy, why would they buy one? By the time the contest is over, they have moved on. You can give away a prize of some kind, but don’t make it that new book you hope to promote. Make them buy it if they want it.

Just a note for those who have been in the game for a while: success in free promos does you absolutely no good in your ranking at amazon.com once the promo is done. This didn’t used to be true. There used to be some carryover. If anything, it might hurt you because you won’t have any sales credited to your ranking for the days of your promo. As far as your number ranking is concerned, free days are just days with no sales. Your numbers will slide. Just be aware of that. You will be listed in the “free book” rankings, which is where those folks who like freebies go, so it’s not all bad, but it all ends with the promo. This could change tomorrow, but that’s where it stands now. I still think it’s worth it. Rankings vary and are affected by many things I can’t control. I don’t worry about them too much in the scheme of things from day to day, as long as they stay reasonable over time.

Discount prices can help boost sales a small amount. 99 cents seems to be the big price point for the most bang, and sales on these discount or “countdown” promos do count toward your ranking. Again, you are going to have to run some promotions if you want it to make a big difference. I did a BookBub ad (yes, I qualified for two, whoot whoot) for Book 2, “Vacation Hiro,” during a 99 cent promotion and sold roughly 380 copies. It was enough to send me to the #1 spot in my category for three days (beating out those Warrior books, finally!) and earn me “best seller” status forever. Totally worth it.

I had talked about KDP select wrapped into this blog, but all I can really say about it is that it works well for me. I tried having Book 1 up at Smashwords and Kobo and Barnes and Noble. Never sold a copy. When you stay with KDP select, you get the free and sale day promo options to help get the word out about your sale just on amazon.com itself. For me, this is the only way to go.

I hope all of that helps you as you make decisions for your own possible free days or sale promotions. It is still an area we are toying with. I’ll continue to let you know what I learn along the way.

Next Week: Week 9 and the wrap up to this blog series on my self-publishing journey.

My winter newsletter goes out in a few days, so make sure you sign up to get that free “Max’s Wild Night” ebook offer. The details will only be in that newsletter!

My writing goal for the month is fairly low: 5,000 words on “Slinky Steps Out.” I have been moderate with that because paperback formatting for “Max’s Wild Night” is well underway with the ebook formatting on the horizon and these require my attention. I also have another editing project coming from Pen-L before the end of March. You will notice, however, that I don’t get a pass for the month or a zero word count goal. Book 4 is not going to write itself.

My answer to this is easy: CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing (which are both amazon.com). There are other places (LightningSource and BookBaby are the two main others), but after we here at Serenity Mountain Publishing have evaluated what we have done over the last few years I see no reason to go anywhere else. I did have “Why Kimba Saved The World” up on other sites for a while, but I saw very little in sales (if any) from places like Smashwords and Kobo. Where you sell your book is different than where you handle the publication process, of course, but I am happy just having all of my eggs in one simple, manageable basket at amazon.com.

Many people, especially authors, are all into hating on amazon.com these days because it has such a corner on the book market. It is the big, hairy elephant of book sales. But why hate? My feeling is that I need all the help I can get as an indie-author, so I’m just gonna jump on that big elephant and ride it around until it no longer serves my purposes. We are always poking at other options, I read what other authors are learning in their own journeys, but so far nothing has been compelling enough to drive me away from amazon.com.

My husband still has trouble with this and asks me questions about one when he means the other or calls it all amazon (maybe just to see the look on my face). They are linked, but they are separate files and book covers and set up.

Once your print book is formatted and ready, all you have to do is create a PDF and you are ready to roll. Setting up an author account at CreateSpace for your print books is not difficult. Block out a couple of hours and just go through the steps one by one. It’s better to start this set up before you format your book because there are set book sizes that are easiest to work with, and you’ll want to know what size you are going with before you start formatting. That’s one of those hundred decisions you are going to have to make. I made this error with “Miss Fatty Cat’s Revenge,” and even being off by a few bits of an inch made things a mess that I had to go back and redo. Major time gobble I could have avoided. Things also get tricky with the book cover size and how to format that cover PDF so the spine fits just perfectly and the back text is centered. My cover designer has this art figured out, and I leave it to her.

The ebook account at Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is a separate step. You only need a JPG file for the cover (there is no back of book like in the print version), and the book file will be a totally separately formatted MOBI or PDF file.

With both of these formats, you can update the files as often as you like. When I have put out a new book, I add the name to the “also by” section at the front of the book and “buy” links to the new books at the end of the kindle version. This new ebook won’t go out to people who already downloaded, but it will be available for those who get it from that time forward (or who specifically ask for the new version through customer service).

There is one exception to this. If you discover that there is some MAJOR error in your ebook, KDP may resend it to everyone who has purchased it. Yes, I discovered this the hard way. I made a minor edit to part of the “Kimba” ebook. Somehow, someway that was never quite explained, in the editing process the ebook designer managed to drop the first paragraph of EVERY chapter in the book. I only checked what I asked them to change and then ran a BookBub free promo where 14,000 copies of this awful version were downloaded. It was a few months later when I was going through to update all of the black-and-white photos to color ones that I noticed something wasn’t quite right. I’m sure you can imagine the horror when I realized what had happened. I think there were some tears. Yep.

Fortunately, this is such an egregious error that I was able to contact KDP customer service and they agreed to resend it. This took six weeks. All that time those nasty, missing-text copies were being read (and, amazingly, reviewed well). Sigh. Yes, this is a lesson in always double and triple checking everything, but it is also a lesson in the fact that amazon.com is willing to work with authors when the unforeseen, major errors come into play.

At this time, I’m a big fan of KDP Select. It gives me promotions for my free or discount days, and I get 70% commission on sales. I can also do some free days if I want without trying to trick the system. I do see some activity through the Prime lending library at about the same price that my normal commission would be, so it’s all good for now. Being a part of this program does mean that you cannot list your book for sale anywhere but amazon.com, but I’m okay with that. I never saw any worthwhile activity from other sites anyhow. This could change when we reevaluate again, but for now I’m happy.

I also love CreateSpace’s “print on demand” feature. I can order one copy or 400 copies or 4,000 copies. It all depends on what I need for upcoming events or sales through my web site. No more do you need to order 1,000 copies to start a print book. You can order and fix errors along the way (you are sure to find some) and then order more later on.

I’ll leave the how to make the most of your set up at both CreateSpace and KDP to other sites. I still go in and tweak stuff and add review notes and change categories on KDP to see if it changes my sales numbers. There are whole books devoted to how to make the most of these setups. Mostly what we have learned with that is don’t try to play it too much. Call your book what it is. Put it in the right category. My biggest problem with having a children’s book about cats is that I have the whole “Warrior” series and all of its forms ahead of me in the rankings at all times. They take up around 30 slots. I did, however, beat them all when I did a 99 cent sale on “Vacation Hiro” through BookBub.com and hit #1 for three days straight. Yay, best seller status! Fight it out fairly and sell your book for what it is, not something that has fewer items in the category because it might get you a higher ranking. You may show up earlier, but if you are not what those readers want, they will ignore you.

Be sure you set up an amazon.com author page, claim your books so they show up on your page, and link your kindle and print copies so they show up together on searches. Here’s mine, so you can see how it works. If the thought of all of this freaks you out, one of those book guides we talked about in an earlier blog will be happy to help or talk you through it.

Where to publish has been the easiest part of our analysis of this self-publishing journey. We are thrilled with where we are and have no plans of changing that. For now. It can all change in the blink of an eye, so we stay alert.

Next Week: Live Events & Blog Tours

I’m going to move this one up in the list because I have a live event over the weekend and can share that experience too.

Writing Notes:

Winter is supposed to be my productive time while the guest house and book events are quieter. A book I’m proofing for Pen-L Publishers is ready for the final go-through this week. “Max’s Wild Night” is heading to the editor next week and book cover creation will start mid-month. So exciting! I’ll begin formatting by the end of February. Max will have his day on May 1st.

I have also submitted my MG/YA biography on Betty White to a local publisher. My goal for a busy February is to reach 10,000 words on “Kimba’s Christmas.” I don’t have release for that scheduled until Octoberish of 2016, but there are plot points between that and “Slinky Steps Out” (April 2016) that need unwrangling. I am also working on vocabulary activities for all three Cats in the Mirror books for homeschool and classroom use. I’d love to explore creating audio books for them as well, but time may get away from me. Things just keep moving forward. Never stop writing!

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